Here you will learn how to create a copy of a previously sent achievement. You may need to duplicate one of your published stories for a variety of reasons, but most commonly, you will find yourself publishing honors list and graduation achievements every semester.
In most cases, these stories are largely the same every semester, with only the dates and students changing. Merit allows you to duplicate an achievement of your choice and keep all of the text from the original story.
To create a copy, locate the achievement on either the Achievements tab or your Dashboard and click the Copy button:
This will create an exact duplicate of this story and immediately take you into Merit's achievement workflow. You can make any necessary changes here. There are a few important things to remember about your copied story:
Dates
The dates from your original achievement will appear throughout this newly copied story. Be on the lookout for these dates everywhere, beginning with your title and summary. In this example, we want to change every instance of Fall 2026 to Spring 2027:
Later on, you will want to update any previous dates that appear in your online student stories and press releases. Keep in mind these dates can show up in both headlines and the bodies of your story.
Students
The students who were part of the original achievement will not be part of this newly copied achievement. Instead, Merit will prompt you to use a new list of students for this story:
Learn more about adding students to an achievement.
Placeholders
The placeholders from your original achievement will be noted in this new copy of your achievement. If your column headers are an exact match to the ones used in the previous achievement, a placeholder will be automatically inserted for you. If not, you will see the name of the original column header in brackets. Use the dropdown box to replace this text with a placeholder:
Group Press Releases
If you are sending your achievement to the media, Merit will create a copy of your individual press release for you, but it won't copy your group press release. Your group press release will use your story's title and summary as your headline and opening and should be edited before proceeding.
If you used a spreadsheet when creating this new achievement, the placeholders in your repeating section will require editing. Replace any of the [MISSING] fields with the appropriate placeholders: